Hi, English isn’t my mother tongue so I was asking myself that question since I first encounted a w/… Back then I was like: “What tf does ‘w slash’ stand for?” And when I found out I was like “How, why, and is it any intuitive?” But I never dared to ask that until now
If that annoys you, never get into advanced maths. There’s arbitrary symbols that make no sense like 3 dots in a triangle means therefore. An upside down capital A means for all.
But that’s a different use case. It’s math, not everyday written language.
Tbf, it’s not just math. The .•. is used pretty often in philosophy (in writing out logical arguments), and I’ve seen it other places occasionally. Not saying you’re wrong, just adding unnecessary context lol
Mathematicians didn’t want to write a conclusion paragraph to their proofs to say that that result proves what they wanted to show, so they just put “QED” at the end which is some Latin/Greek phrase to the effect.
Then they got too lazy to write that because they do proofs all the time, so they just put a box ∎ that means “so, basically yeah. there you have it.”
Q.E.D. is “quod erat demonstrandum”, meaning “thus, it has been demonstrated”.
Yeah, I’ve got “Advanced Mathematics” as a university lecture and some students made a glossary to understand what tf the prof is writing